It is very cool how Zionism tends to simply boil down to that Arabs are subhuman. Can’t think of a single Zionist talking head who hasn’t done the Arabs are simply unable to be civilised spiel.

He argues that most men have such a limited sense of self that they are uncertain that they possess “selves we could want to relate to.” He contends, “We only seem to learn that the “self” is something we have to control tightly, since otherwise it might upset our plans.... We never really give ourselves much chance to know ourselves better or develop more contact with ourselves, since...all this threatens the ‘control’ we have been brought up to identify our masculinity with. We feel trapped, though we do not know how we are constantly remaking this trap for ourselves.”

This is something that struck home with me. I had this realization fairly recently in that I tend to just do whatever is required of me. Currently trying a lot of different things to see what I actually like doing. Seen myself as a cog in the machine whose only worth is what I can provice for others, not as a being myself.

Overall liked chapter 6. Hits some of the thoughts I've had of myself both as unemployed and employed. Chapter 7 is overall pretty cisnormative, but it is nice to have some kind of wholistic view of feminism here, given that I was brought up in a fairly separatist feminist culture. I tend to not trust separatist mens groups as far as I can throw them, it just fills me with self loathing.

Anyway, pretty short and very late post here as I've been very busy this week.

New Parliamentarian just dropped.

Behold, the healthcare reform endorsed by the democratic party.

These are probably supply lines, which are also called mains.

They got high on their own supply. It is a mediocre game with nice graphics, nothing more.

It all went wrong when Charlemagne laid down the verdict of Verden.

You can track back 95% of all the bullshit of christianity to it being introduced to Germanic people. Germanic people were meant to be heathens forever splintered by regional conflicts.

UlyssesT is currently logged off again, so you should be safe for now.

I remember being incredibly confused when people kept talking about gamba and I kept imagining the shrimp.

The slave elves like being slaves, apart from Dobby.

I also assume it takes at least some amount of concentration to use magic to wash dishes, cook food, clean etc.

They didn't seem at all bothered by the fact that maybe Kamala could have run on a platform of "He's taking your healthcare away - vote for me if you want to live" and won but her team failed so egregiously by not communicating this idea effectively

Because democrats think that would sound like socialism and lose them the four or five never trump republican columnists that they are desperate to court.

Anyone that is poor or to the left of them is held in contempt, they are just supposed to vote for you.

Aldovia and Belgravia would be on par with France or Germany.

Pengali is a tier below but would still be a regional power.

I have never been violent in my adulthood but the killing of the emotional sense was definitely part of my life. I have found recently that I don't think I know what emotions feel like and never really knew that emotions were felt in the self. I thought they were just something people applied to situations. Like this is suppose to be sad so I feel sad.

It is strange to be performing an emotion. When I get into crisis and high stress it entirely shuts down and I start performing what I'm supposed to do like an automaton. Feels very surreal, especially when you see people grieving around you and feel like a fraud and a monster for not really feeling.

It makes me useful in emergencies as I tend to be solution focused, but I don't think it is enough to make up for it.

I think these two chapters do a decent job of voicing why I am uncomfortable being cishet in a way. Seeing patriarchal relationships all around I got some gender essentialism stuck in my brain. I just couldn't understand why women would ever want to be in a relationship with men, it got as far as me trying to date men instead to spare women (sorry lads, didn't work out). I was inherently bad and attraction to women was a violent dirty impulse. Like woke catholic guilt I guess. But these are my very personal brainworms, so lets look at some other stuff.

In How Can I Get Through to You? Terrence Real includes a chapter titled “A Conspiracy of Silence,” in which he emphasizes that we are not allowed in this culture to speak the truth about what relationships with men are really like. This silence represents our collective cultural collusion with patriarchy. To be true to patriarchy we are all taught that we must keep men’s secrets. Real points out that the fundamental secret we share is that we will remain silent: “When girls are inducted into womanhood, what is it exactly that they have to say that must be silenced. What is the truth women carry that cannot be spoken. The answer is simple and chilling. Girls, women—and also young boys—all share this in common. None may speak the truth about men.”

This is something that hits after my grandmother died. She was survived by her 3 children, two women and a man. My uncle was adamant that she would have wanted to be buried with her mother and her mother's husband, but both my mother and aunt vetoed that in no uncertain terms. My grandmother's father had been abusive to her while she was growing up and that was apparently kept as a secret between only the women of the family. There was a slightly similar thing when I started venting about my father to my mother (who never said a bad word about him while he was still alive) and peeling back how the break up actually went. She took all the public blame and let him constantly bad mouth her to their common friends even though it was bs (leaving her with no friends, since all their friends were in common). She argued that he needed the support more than her. She then confirmed a couple of my suspicions about how he never really cared about me or my brother, but how he kept partial custody mostly as a means of controlling her. She said she wanted us (me and my brother) to give him a fair shake, which I guess we did and both ended up disliking him. Ironically he thought that we were somehow indoctrinated against him by my mother on his deathbed.

In conversations with men whose mothers were passive as their sons were victimized by fathers or other male parental caregivers, I found that the men were far more likely than other men to idealize their moms, seeing them as victims without choice.

This got me thinking about how my mom and her partner, they got together when I was 7-8. Now, he was never really presented as or has attempted to take the role as male role model or father figure, but there is still some ways in which his behaviour, and mums behaviour in turn, conditioned me. While he has never been physically violent, he starts yelling and gets angry at the drop of a hat. The slightest provocation would set him off, which left emotional regulation of this adult ass man as my responsibility as a child. Just to have peace and quiet if nothing else.

She would bite back if he ever started yelling at me or my brother directly, but it was still a constant source of stress to live in the same house as him. I don't think he is an inherently bad person, and she does say she loves him. I've questioned her a couple of times about it, as far as I know he has never been physically abusive at least. But it is hard to be sure given her track record of ignoring her own needs.

Now that patriarchal straight men have been compelled through mass media to face the fact that homosexual males are not “chicks with dicks,” that they can and do embody patriarchal masculinity, straight male sexual dominance of biological females has intensified, for it is really the only factor that distinguishes straight from gay. Concurrently, homophobia becomes amplified among heterosexual men because its overt expression is useful as a way to identify, among apparently similar macho men, who is gay and who is straight.

This section however, I don't understand at all.

If you use Dr Google you'll find that you fit the symptoms for most illnesses too.

If it isn't something that actively hinders you it is nothing to worry about. Probably just that you have an active imagination which is cool and good actually.

It is a systemic problem to be sure, but that doesn't mean that enriching yourself through the extreme imisseration of others is somehow morally neutral. Like that american who went to Palestine, stole land and defended himself with "If I didn't steal it someone else would".

When your entire economic system is based on extreme inequality it makes sense that this is a line of thinking that would be both spread and adapted. I don't have to question why child workers are manufacturing my goods under extremely poor and dangerous conditions, it is just how the world is.

It is incredible how a lot of these liberal ghouls pick this and only this moment to pipe up against violence. They've spent the last year running interference for or ignoring genocide, but this is where the line is crossed.

Guess this time it was someone they can relate to.

I'm a part of the "default" so I don't have to consider it as much. I might be more towards the gender doesn't matter end of the spectrum, but I can appreciate how that is similar to a white person telling you that they don't see colour.

Being that I'm a fair bit younger and from a more "liberal" background, grew up in Sweden during the 90s and 00s which is when feminism as a "thing" hit it's apex. After that it has been steadily declining in popularity. What feminism in Sweden means is a bit difficult to explain. It is very much focused on getting women into the work force, financially and legally independent and access to childcare, reproductive rights and maternity/paternity leave. As such a lot of the messaging that men have to be the head of the family etc were a lot more subtle than the constant barrages from her own childhood.

Of course, a lot of the professions of feminism were just skin deep and the movement was already running out of steam. But the role of the man as the obvious head of the household was already well eroded. When I went to church the trendy thing for priests was to alternate between she and he for God. But one of the big issues that eventually sank the movement was the inability to move on from separatist second wave feminism, it never really dealt with the imperialist or white supremacist part nor provided a convincing answer for what a healthy masculinity was supposed to be other than slogans like "a real man cares about their child". If you are interested in learning more about the history of political feminism in Sweden, Yvonne Hirdman wrote a book titled "What is to be done" (Vad bör göras? : Jämställdhet och politik under femtio år) which chronicles the history between the 60's to the 10's, but I don't think it is available in English. I disagree with a lot of the conclusions but it is an interesting view if you're interested in gender history. With all that said, lets move on from this tangent.

I was raised by a single mother who very much is a feminist and wanted both me and my brother to be comfortable in showing our emotions. I assume that she had a lot similar experiences to the story of Terrence Real describes. We were very much schooled into patriarchal norms by our peers. Sadly, mom didn't really have any good answers for what we should do when the wheels of me and my older brother hit the road of society.

Moving on to chapter 3, I was very much schooled into patriarchal thinking by my peers, and also by myself. The early part of the chapter reminds me of how mum told me about how when I was a baby I was always smiling and laughing. As a young boy I was also very cheery and outgoing, if a bit strange. Once I started seeing how my brother got shunned and how sad that made mom I had it in my head that I had to be "normal" so that I wouldn't cause a fuss. This involved, and still involves, a lot of shame and internalized anger. I had some very rudimentary feminist theory under my belt during my adolescence (separatist second wave, having had access to something like this book would likely have helped a lot), so I never blamed women or feminism for my problems to fit in, but myself for failing and other boys and men for setting the rules. I had a lot of dissonance between forcing myself to be normal and fit in with the normal boys (did sports etc) in order to seem well adjusted while secretly blaming my own maleness and others of my gender for feeling like shit and being unable to truly fit in.

Little boys are the only males in our culture who are allowed to be fully, wholly in touch with their feelings, allowed moments when they can express without shame their desire to love and be loved. If they are very, very lucky, they are able to remain connected to their inner selves or some part of their inner selves before they enter a patriarchal school system where rigid sex roles will be enforced by peers as rigorously as they are in any adult male prison. Those rare boys who happen to live in antipatriarchal homes learn early to lead a double life: at home they can feel and express and be; outside the home they must conform to the role of patriarchal boy.

I can recognize the double life, but I would also smothered my emotions at home. I would act out as the happy and always jovial son to my mother so she wouldn't worry about me. She had enough to deal with between work/studies, money problems and my brother who was constantly depressed. Every now and then when mom would attend me during school or sports she would often get aghast at the kind of treatment I had to deal with. This was a further reason for me to hide away what was happening. The only real positive reinforcement I got for a masculine attribute was my 'stoicism'. I had my football coaches specifically tell me that my role in the team was to be the one that the other boys got to "mess with" as I could take it. So I did take it, but I won't go into details. Talking about it with mum as an adult she was shocked at what was actually going on and wishes that she could have done more to help. A kind of interesting tangent is that by the time I was reading Harry Potter, which was when I was 8, I never once identified with Harry Potter. The one I identified with was Ron Weasley, which probably says a whole lot about my self esteem. That is a constant in when I've read/seen a lot of fiction, I don't identify as the main character but instead as the lesser, the sidekick.

The thing I really don't recognize myself in is the urge to connect to your father. Maybe it is because I didn't see him much and he was always emotionally abscent, but it felt like somewhere I had to be out of duty more than out of care. The hope of fatherly love was never truly on the table in my experience, we would get abandoned from our loving home to go off and spend a weekend with someone that didn't really care about us. If it wasn't for my younger half brother I would probably have insisted to stop going there around age 10-11, but I kept going to see him.

Currently playing Sulfur when I do play, which isn't often. Haven't gotten very far but it is alright so far.

Got it gifted for my birthday by an aquaintance who knows the devs. Kind of a cute/grotesque boomer shooter roguelike.